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He just stared at me. Not much for humor, that one. “This injury aside,” he said, “you’ve been feeling well?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “Just a happy little angel doing angel things.”
He nodded. “Good. Have you had any trouble, mentally or emotionally?”
“Besides wanting to strangle my roommate?”
He didn’t even look fazed, the aloof android. “That wouldn’t kill her.”
“But it would be satisfying.” I raised my index finger.
His eyes glinted silver. “Revenge is a short-lived pleasure.”
“Not when it’s served cold.”
“Which would preclude the notion of exacting it by strangulation, which is usually done in the heat of the moment as a crime of passion.”
I kind of wanted to strangle him right now.
“Have you had moments of dizziness,” he went on, oblivious to my violent musings, “blackouts, intrusive thoughts?—”
“I mean, my thoughts are all kind of intrusive, the meddlesome bastards. Absolutely no manners at all. But you can’t really expect anything else from squirrels on drugs.”
His eye twitched, the involuntary reaction breaking through his stoic mien.
Inwardly, I grinned. Disrupting his unshakable composure was a sport of mine. I did like him, reserved though he might be, and it was precisely because he’d been a friendly if distant presence in my life that I felt the urge to needle him.
Others might have found his inquiries strange, maybe even invasive. Me? I’d long ago stopped wondering about Azrael’s weirdness level. The dude had the shittiest job among angelkind—okay, yeah, maybe not literally the shittiest. That distinction would fall upon the task of shoveling actual feces out of unicorn boxes.
But the Angel of Death virtually had no life. And that was a weirdly philosophical turn of phrase. Ha!
What I meant was that as the angel tasked with ferrying deserving souls to Heaven, he had to be in a million places at once. People died every second of every day, all over the world, hundreds of thousands dying at the same time in different locations, and the Angel of Death needed to personally check in with every single soul.
Azrael, through a special “blessing”—some would call it a curse—was able to split himself, or maybe just his awareness and presence of mind, into thousands of smaller pieces, scouting the world for recently deceased souls. I didn’t know if he got a notification about each soul that died—geez, the mental noise from that would drive me insane—but he would know where to go to check on a soul and either confirm that they were slated for Hell or rubber-stamp their mark for Heaven, then take them to a gate.
If someone died, and Azrael couldn’t come right away, the soul would simply kind of hang around, unmarked and unsupervised, until Azrael had time to come check on them. Apparently, a tendency for whether a person would go to Hell or to Heaven was already evident in the soul even before Azrael officially marked them, but demons were only allowed to reap the soul after Azrael had confirmed the damnation.
In any case, he was busy. He didn’t really get time off, he couldn’t take a break, and he wasn’t allowed to rest. As far as I knew, he didn’t even have any sort of home base up here in Heaven, like a room or a suite. He wasn’t truly part of angel society, occupying this weird position just outside of it. He’d interact with others here and there, but those had to be short moments, carved out of the mentally taxing task of keeping up with the steady influx of deaths all over the world.
Some of the monitoring and managing of the recently deceased souls he could apparently do subconsciously, or concurrently to doing something else, like talking to an angel. But it seemed like it took effort to stay present in one spot and focus on a conversation for longer than a few minutes. I could always tell when the strain of pooling most of his mental resources in one place when he visited me started to become difficult for him—he’d get a faraway look in his eyes and seem distracted, then his expression would show tension seeping in.
So, was it any wonder that the dude had no social skills to speak of? Thousands of years of being constantly on the job, no time to actually hang out with others—that would certainly leave its mark. If he was blunt and gruff and kind of robotic, that was just par for the course. I thought he was doing quite well, considering the toll his task must have been taking on him.
And to be fair, I really shouldn’t be one to talk, what with my own pronounced social awkwardness. It gave us a strange kind of kinship.
And his line of questioning me did have its purpose, as he’d explained to me at the start when he’d come to check in on me a few days after my ascension. He’d told me it was his responsibility as the only angel capable of making humans ascend to ensure that those newly made angels didn’t exhibit any short- or long-term side effects of their transformation.
“Any headaches?” he asked, drawing me back to our current conversation.
I opened my mouth to negate that question, like I always did, but then I remembered the dull, throbbing pain I’d felt in my temples yesterday. It’d happened a few times, whereas before, I’d never experienced anything similar.
Azrael zeroed in on that second of hesitation. “Elaborate.”
I frowned. “I just…I had a bit of a headache yesterday.”
“What were you doing?”
Pressing my lips together, I hesitated yet again. This came uncomfortably close to talking about my meeting with Aziel. I opted for a half-truth. “I was chatting with a…friend.”
